Honestly, crying about piracy is like crying about people sharing stuff that they like with others.
No, it isnt stealing, no one can steal your work, because stealing requires someone to take something away from you.
Piracy is just copying something and giving the copy to someone else, without you (the creator) getting money for it.
Nothing and nobody can stop me from sharing the files on my hard drive with someone else, period.
Dsp needs to understand, that the people that truly love his games and are well off financially, will pay just to support him and his work, and the people that dont meet that criteria, they will not pay no matter what.
They are not paying because they cant get the files somewhere else, they are paying because they want to support you, and there are websites dedicated to that model, such as Patreon.
Thats how things work, and to restrict some files to only paying customers, is the equivalent of preventing someone from giving something to me that they created for free, because the copy costs nothing to make, therefore there's no reason why I cant share that with someone else.
You can't sugar coat pirates being pirates. That is basically the MO of the internet. When somebody is selling something and we dl it for free, we are pirates and thieves, no nice way to say it. There are tons of reasons that people pirate, none of them are good, so there is no point trying to make yourself, me, and other pirates look like we do no wrong. I know the difference between right and wrong, and I am sure you do too.
Now one thing most people and businesses who make content have no clue about and that is how to combat piracy. Take the music industry, all people want is affordable music they like available in an easy manner. Me, I would love to be able to order cd's with the exact music I want on it, printed in lossless format for highest quality, and shipped to me. To my knowledge, there is no option like that for me because the music industry doesn't want everybody to get the exact songs they want. They want to sell me 5 cd's with 1 to 2 songs per cd I like, and the rest I don't like, just so they make me buy 5 cd's to get the small amount of music I want. It is at that point that I cease caring about highest quality and hit up youtube or other places. They are blind on how to tackle piracy. As Steam has proven, offer an awesome service, and the money and people will come.
What folks do with patreon and other services on the internet, well, their choice, but many of them way over value their time and effort. I will never back a patreon for $20 unless I get a meaty demo and the game proves itself in that demo. And even then, I will not sign up for $20 a month, it will be a one time payment after the project is finished. I don't earn money to support another person who may or may not be doing good work. All of us here know how big a scam Patreon can be, well, not Patreon, but those who try to use it to milk people who trust them by giving them a monthly paycheck. So far I can honestly say there are less than 10 games, out of the 100+ I have tried here, that I would outright buy. A third of them are on the popular games part of the game forum.
As for people who try to block pirates, as others have said, there are more games out there than people can count, if one makes it hard, we move on. The content creator loses those who give a damn about their game, they lose word of mouth, they lose potential cash. Their choice.
Anyway, stopping here. I can discuss this topic till the cows come home.
